CJ7

I think it was the Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar who observed that ET is nothing but a boy-and-his-dog movie, Lassie with supernatural powers.

Take that literally and you wind up with CJ7, the latest from Hong Kong comedy actor-director Stephen Chow – best known here for the brilliant Kung Fu Hustle and the patchier Shaolin Soccer.

Jackie Chan is regularly compared to Buster Keaton, but Chow has more in common with the sentimental slapstick of Charlie Chaplin. Here he’s an impoverished, uneducated construction worker, Ti. Ti works day and night to pay his son Dicky’s private school fees. They live in a condemned shell of a building, eat scraps, and a night’s entertainment consists of squashing the cockroaches who share their home.

Dicky – nine-year-old Xu Jiao is actually a girl, and a fine actress to boot – doesn’t entirely share his father’s sense of priorities. Bullied at school – except for the three-ton schoolgirl monster Maggie (played by a guy) who has a crush on him – Dicky pines for a flash new toy to dazzle his class-conscious classmates.

Ti obliges, picking up a strangely amorphous green ball while scouring through a rubbish heap, oblivious to the space ship hovering behind him.

Chow teases out the blob’s unusual properties with wry deliberation. Dicky is delighted when his toy pops into the shape of a puppy, a puppy with a green rubber body and a white furball head, with big blue saucer eyes and a lollipop antenna on top. Could this be a new robot prototype, or maybe a super-dog from space?

It’s at this point the picture really hits its stride, as Dicky and his new friend set about settling some old scores with a similar over the top Looney Tunes quality to Kung Fu Hustle. There is a kicker – but I won’t give it away here.

Unlike Chow’s other movies this is definitely a family film first and foremost. Some of the “robust” Chinese approach to child-rearing and broad humour may dismay sensitive liberal parents – and of course it’s subtitled – but this has a more generous spirit than initially appears, and kids and parents alike should lap up the great visual gags and an emotionally wrenching climax.

It’s worth pointing out what a fine filmmaker Chow has become. He has an unerring eye for the right camera placement, and an oblique, screwy imagination that animates even his more manipulative moments. Just look what he can do with a pedestrian crossing signal!

In the end, this isn’t really a movie about a boy and his dog. It’s about the power, or rather, the richness of the imagination, and the impoverishment of consumer society. (A lot of parents will recognize the truth in that unfashionable observation.) The film’s sensitivity to the growing gap between the rich and the poor in twenty-first Century China shouldn’t be overlooked.

As for CJ7, whatever he or it may be, every kid has got to want one… And the cost? The price of a movie ticket.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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